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Naming – a follow-up
Premature naming is also painful. Our little girl Willow, still in utero, was discovered to be a boy at the 20-week ultrasound. It is traumatic: she had already taken form and substance, and we had to grieve that she was gone. Our little girl was never to be, and a new name has to be…
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Discipline is knowing what you want
I learned yesterday that knowing what you want is more than just wanting what you know to be true. If you want something, truly want it, it doesn’t matter what stories you tell yourself about that want. Say you want something that you’re convinced isn’t ok–like a pint of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. Say…
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Tapestry
We are all just a slender thread in the rich tapestry of life; a slender fragile thread pushing thru the weave in pursuit of a yet unfolded future. We join with others in this weave, braid ourselves together in marriages, in friendships, in working relationships, in mentorships, and in countless other ways. And it is…
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I bequeath to this post the name “Naming”
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. — Phil Karlton When you’re doing something important and creative, you end up trying to find a name for the thing you’re working on. And then you realize that naming is hard. A name is a pointer to something, a thing…
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Warm Coffee Cheese
(or: how to steal enough ideas that people think you came up with them on your own) In northern Sweden and Finland, there’s this thing called “kaffeost” or “juustoleipä” which means “coffee cheese” or “cheese bread.” This cheese, very similar to cheese curds, gets dropped into a warm cup of coffee to both flavor the…
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Lawbook or Lawman?
Lucille tootled along I5, radio tuned to 91.5, the soothing voice of Terry Gross washing over her like honey on a warm buttered piece of bread. Her left hand held the steering wheel in a gentle grasp at the 6 o’clock position, right hand draped casually over the gearshift of her 2012 maroon Toyota Camry.…
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Conscientiousness
Johan woke up early, that day, that spring day in 2017. He crept downstairs in the dark house, after feeding himself his regular cup of coffee (small) and eating his breakfast (knäckebröd & ost). Silently, he picked up the shoes lying by his door, two pair shoes slightly larger than his feet, shoes left there by…
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The Poetry of Programming
“The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures… Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s…
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Active Communication
So, in all of our dealings with customers, our active communication should fall into three camps: 1) Relationship-building 2) Strategic thinking 3) Exceptions & Problems There’s another kind of communication that happens all the time, that we want to avoid: 4) Information transfer ********************************************* Let’s think about these in detail: 1) Relationship-building: This ranges from…
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Perfection is the Enemy of the Good: Hiring
We have four core values at Silvertrek: The desire and ability to learn The ability to do something without waiting for it to be perfect The desire to take ownership in what you do The ability to be upbeat and positive, even in the face of adversity We hold ourselves accountable to these core values,…